Faculty members at the School of Public Health (SPH), IUB are engaged in numerous international collaborations with some of the world’s leading research organizations and universities, which include the following:
• McMaster University, Canada
• SHARE (South Asian Hub for Advocacy, Research and Education on Mental Health)
• School of Public Health, Harvard University, US
• Heidelberg University, Germany
SPH works closely with McMaster University, Canada to supervise the Prospective Urban and Rural Epidemiological (PURE) study in Bangladesh. A part of a larger worldwide study in 20 countries involving 400,000 participants, PURE is the largest study of its kind which investigates the impact of modernization, urbanization and globalization on obesity and other risk factors for CVD and diabetes.
PURE’s research has already been published in highly esteemed peer-reviewed journals such as The Lancet, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
SPH faculty members are actively involved with SHARE. Funded by SHARE, SPH is currently conducting research using cluster randomized control trial to determine the impact of automated text messaging reminders on increasing rates of care seeking for depressed women. SPH faculty members are also enrolled in several training programs organized by SHARE in India and Sri Lanka.
SPH maintains a strong connection with Harvard University through Professor Omar Rahman, who is concurrently the Dean of SPH and also the Vice Chancellor of IUB and an adjunct faculty member in Demography at the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard School of Public Health. He was also an alumnus of the Harvard School of Public Health. Professor Rahman was previously Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Demography at Harvard University and a Research Fellow in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. SPH also works in close collaboration with Heidelberg University, Germany.
Apart from international collaborations, SPH partners with the School of Liberal Arts and Social Science, IUB to conduct a biannual survey of over 1200 randomly selected households in rural areas across several districts in Bangladesh. SPH uses data from this survey to work with MPH students to complete a culminating project/thesis on various topics such as healthcare seeking behavior; socio-demographic factors that affect medicine consumption; effects of fuel type on breathing difficulties among women; and depressive symptoms as a risk factor for injuries.